Why Moby-Dick nerds keep chasing the whale

Why Moby-Dick nerds keep chasing the whale

Moby-Dick is notoriously impenetrable and impossibly rich. It might be the only novel about which the following two statements are both true: first, that an average reader might need to be forcibly strapped down to finish the whole thing, and second, that if Moby-Dick were all he read for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t miss out on all that much. That might be why the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s annual 25-hour reading marathon of Melville’s c…